


the thief had not come to steal

by orphan_account



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-13
Updated: 2012-06-13
Packaged: 2017-11-07 15:29:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,334
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/432663
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The decline of one doesn't guarantee the ascension of another. Never Let Me Go AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the thief had not come to steal

**Author's Note:**

> A (more or less) human AU set in the same universe as Never Let Me Go. Familiarity with the source material isn't necessary, but might help. Some minor edits have been made since this was originally posted on tumblr.

I.

He is galvanised into action only when he finds that his almost-death has resulted in an almost-person; late, but he promises himself that it’s better than never at all. Alfred has always been passionate in his anger, and productive. Far more so than when he is calm, sedated and quiet.

(He wonders, sometimes, if the doctors in that emergency room had ever regretted saving him, and whose life had been wasted for it. Too much blood loss, too fast, and he’d not driven a car since. Withdrawals in a sick bed would put anyone off driving, but now he doesn’t trust himself, and won’t let himself behind the wheel of a car. If he is ever again saved at the cost of someone else’s life, he thinks he’d kill himself. And that would be a waste for everyone.)

The world has changed, he thinks, but not necessarily for the better. They’re playing God like this, trying to decide the worth of one life against another.

And somewhere, there is a copy of him running around. Because he was dying in a hospital, clinging to his life by the thread of an IV, and he hadn’t been expected to live. That must be the criteria. The people no one will miss, the people that die without anyone’s help.

Alfred wonders where he’s gone off to, sometimes, his duplicate. He knew there was one--that he existed, and that he had a name and a personality and that he would be raised somewhere else, somewhere far off from where he was begotten. Another country, maybe. Not the States, he thinks, maybe not even on this continent. In another life, he’d have liked to go to Europe. He hopes he’s there, this other him. He hopes he’s happy. He hopes they’re all very happy with themselves.

 

II.

Matthew meets Alfred for the first time when he shows up in the midst of a group of protestors, angry teens and twenty-somethings, holding signs written in thick black paint—“every person a free person”; “stop unethical organ donation”; “regain bodily autonomy.” He’s never sure if they’re protesting for his (kind’s) sake or for themselves. Moral outrage.

He’s seen things like this before, but never in person. They showed videos where he went to school, of protestors and the things they’d done in the past, storming hospitals with their anger and their violence. They seem passionate. Matthew thinks he can appreciate that. He’s not seen passion in a long time.

They’re loud, too—all the more exaggerated in the hospital setting, the closed corridors and closed windows, hidden away by sterile blinds. He kicks at the blanket draped over his legs and swings himself off the bed using the railing, standing on shaky feet. His breath is fast already, and his shoulders shudder a bit—there is a terrible wrenching in his gut when he moves his torso, but they never taught him anatomy, and they never told him what they took. The not knowing makes it hurt more.

His carer must be somewhere in the hospital. Has to be. He thinks of calling for Arthur, but he’s busy elsewhere, he imagines, and Arthur has done enough for him over the years. In some ways it feels like coming full circle—Arthur who had once guaranteed him a place in the school despite his original still being alive, making sure he was taken to an optometrist when they found that his eyesight was poor, and now holding his hand through his first donation, face grim and dark the entire time. Arthur is gruff, but mostly he cares too much, and therein lays the problem. He cares in the most genuine way possible, and he doesn’t want anyone to see (there are dangers to revealing one’s soul after all).

Matthew does not want to call him, though, so he teeters out of the room by himself, feeling like his legs might never work properly again. He uses the wall as a support, and it’s not so uncommon that anyone stops him, or takes him back to his room—a small blessing. And besides, the hospital staff is too concerned with the care of firsts, originals, _real_ people, and now with the protestors outside. No one will mind if he slips out for a moment.

He meets Alfred there, while the other man is sprinting down the hall, a sheaf of papers in his hand. He never bothered to find out what they were, and in his dulled and colourless memories, all he can remember is that Alfred’s eyes were bluer than his, and that they were the exact same height, but that Alfred’s broader build made it feel like he was reeling, somewhere in between a could-have-been and a should-have-been.

What he _learns_ is that they are not exact copies, or that Alfred is not an exact original. He also learns that Alfred has strong hands, and that he’s rash, and angry. He wears glasses and whispers, “Come with me?” into Matthew’s ear.

In a lapse of judgment, he goes.

 

III.

Francis tells him once that he’s stopped counting the years. He says it with a sallow little smile to go with his gaunt face, still graceful enough and elegant enough in spite of it. His facial structure is aristocratic, and reduced down to bones, he is beautiful in the saddest sort of way.

Arthur hates him.

He still recalls his first meetings with the Bonnefois heir, when there was still flesh on his bones. He was an artist, a profession Arthur finds superfluous and meaningless. He’d seen Francis’ art. There was nothing to it. Fine lines, horizons and perspectives and all the right colours in all the right places. He’d spent so much time in the schools by then that he _knew_ art, in his own way. He was no critic, but he knew the honest emotion that came out of the truest art. Francis has an excellent grip of all the technical elements that make a piece of art _good_.

But when he looks at Francis’ paintings, he sees that the man had no soul.

His donor expires because Francis needs two functioning kidneys despite the fact that he could survive with one. His political ties are pushy and invested, monetarily, emotionally, and for public appearance. Bonnefois is alive because there are too many people playing god at once.

Arthur _knows_. He knows how it works, how this system is meant to benefit the originals, and the rich above them. He knows that they are patterned from the scum of the earth, that he was once a guttersnipe or a pickpocket or some drug dealer or another. But who he was before has no bearing on who he is now.

When the donor he’s been caring for expires, he slaps the sleeping face with its cheeks still intact, wakes him up in the middle of the night. He’s a carer—no one minds where he goes or what he does so long as he can do his job, and so long as he does it well. No one wants a hysterical donor that needs to be strapped down and sedated.

Francis wakes up, and Arthur finds that he’s crying, and that his Catholic guilt makes him want to die, and that he will continue to want to die. He will die. His donors expire.

“You’re selfish,” Arthur spits into his face. “Selfish and cowardly. Your god is made for judging, for deciding your worth, isn’t he?”

Arthur tells him about the woman who’s died— _expired_ —for him. He tells him that her name was Jeanette, that she was from Toulouse, that she’d come to England because Francis was in England and her blood type was a match. It was her first donation, he says. Donors don’t have religions, he says. There is no heaven or hell for them, because they are not allowed to be people. “And for you,” he finishes, tired now, “I imagine there can only be a hell.”

Francis wanders off the next day, just disappears from the sterile white halls of the hospital. They find him hunched over his rosary beads in a church.

 

IV.

When he finally begins to grow older, despite the best efforts made to keep his body young, he thinks about telling the whole of his life, all his successes and failures. He is a narcissist, in love with the story he’s made for himself. He wants it all in writing.

There are protestors outside all the time, now. He hardly leaves the hospital anymore—every time they think he’s ready to be released, there is a new problem.

He never wanted for people to die. Not for him.

Arthur slips into his room one evening, like he’s done only once before. The rest of their meetings have been in daylight, or at the very least, in the company of others. He’s come to delight in telling Francis about his donors. He can feel his heart pumping in his throat.

Francis’ eyes are good, and he has good taste, and he thinks that in another life, he might have thought Arthur an elegant man. Rail-thin and poorly dressed, his hair a disaster and skin like something out of a 1960s photograph, backlit by the fading sun filtering in through the blinds, throwing his already sharp features into relief. He turns his face from Francis and his profile is that of a statue, some god of war or pride or wrath. Not a god at all, but a sin.

There was a time when he’d hated Arthur, for reminding him of exactly who and what he was. The feeling hasn’t left him, but he’s come to have a deeper appreciation for Arthur as a whole, rather than how Arthur presents himself. A callous man couldn’t be a carer with a track record such as his. There is something else going on in his head. He wants to know, but he doesn’t want to ask.

Francis tells him one day, “Perhaps what’s truly wrong with you is that you care too much.”

It’s the first time Arthur’s smiled at him, small and sad. He thinks that Arthur is nearing thirty. He’ll be a donor soon too.

 

V.

Alfred takes Matthew away from the hospital and its protestors without asking. Matthew, raised on legend and myth and children’s stories of magical cupboards to different worlds and wizards and witches and boys that never grow old—he wants desperately for an adventure. Just once, he tells himself, clutching idly at his wrist, glancing around the interior of the train.

He pays for a motel room for the night—it’s cheap (“cost efficient,” Alfred protests) but it’s clean and it’s comfortable, and they push the two twin beds together and heap all the blankets into the middle. There’s no heating, and it reminds Matthew of an older time in a different house, shabby and friendly but never warm.

Matthew’s never stayed in a hotel before. It’s comfortable, he thinks, but unfamiliar. Alfred is that way, too. He feels like a stranger in a borrowed body. He’s reminded of those protest signs, reminded that he is less than a person, and something clenches in his gut, an open wound that can’t repair itself. He isn’t even a whole half-person anymore. He will never pass himself off as Alfred, with his easy smiles and easier charm. He has no social skills, and he has no charisma.

Alfred won’t stop looking at him though, and it’s disconcerting. He doesn’t know what to do with his hands, or where to sit or where to look or what to say. He wants step by step instructions. What do you say to the man who shares your genetics? What does he say to his original?

He needs to say nothing, in the end, because Alfred begins talking. Idle babbling, short questions he pelts at Matthew like a test—

“What’s your name?” Matthew.

“Where are you from?” Quebec. (“I crashed a car near Montreal once.” And he looks sick.)

It goes like that, until Matthew is relaxing, asking his own questions. “What do you like to do?”

Alfred tells him about stars and constellations, how heavenly bodies can be measured in mathematics, how the world is a series of formulas and reactions and he explains quantum foam and starstuff in a great whirl of words and motion. Alfred is contained energy, and Matthew feels passive.

The conversation winds down, slowing.

Alfred asks, “What’s your favourite colour?”

And Matthew whispers, “I think I’m going blind.”

They fall asleep tangled up in one another, curled into a messy nest of blankets.

 

VI.

He says he no longer counts years, and there is terror in his eyes. “Too many years,” Arthur says, stroking his hair idly. Francis is living on borrowed time. On borrowed life. There are crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes where there have never been any before.

Francis tangles his fingers in with Arthur’s and asks for him to care.

He gasps and shudders and thrashes, because even if he wishes to die, his body does not. Arthur sets the pillow back down under Francis’ head as the monitor goes flat. The next morning he goes to a church for the first time in his life, and buys a framed print of a painting he hates.

The painting hangs on the wall and he wonders if there is such a thing as a soul at all.

 

VII.

Alfred has never bothered much with self-destruction, not in years—he’s had his fill of it, the early morning hangovers and collapsed veins, all culminating into the crash that changed his life and started Matthew’s. But Matthew is a catalyst in his own way—he _wants_ again, yearns for catastrophe at his hands.

“If you’re going to be ruined,” he whispers, pressing the end of a cigarette to Matthew’s lips, “at least give me the honour of being the one to do it.”


End file.
